Literary interlude

...no wonder people social-climb in New York, since it has more genuine social mobility than London or Paris, where clothes, accents, and manners reveal all too much about origins and where there are no more than three degrees of separation between any two people. Everyone already knows every single bad thing about you. In all three cities, people practice what Paul Valéry called the "delirious professions," those careers that depend on self-assurance and the opinions of others rather than on certifiable skills. The delirious professions, I'd hazard, comprise literature, criticism, design, the visual arts, acting, advertising, all of the media—but not dance, for instance, where you can either do your thirty-two tour jetés without "traveling" downstage, or you can't. If you can do them, you can dance in any company in the world without further ado. But all the delirious professions, having no agreed-upon standards, require introductions and alliance, protectors and patrons, famous teachers or acclaim by someone reputed. In short, they depend upon that most mercurial of all possessions: reputation.

—Edmund White, City Boy

Comments

[Ryland Walker Knight]

America, fuck yeah.

[Matthias Galvin]

Well, not totally.

Who you know gets you there.
But it's what you know lets you stay.

[gerald]

no...getting there makes you stay....
reputation snowballs regardless of ability unless of course you're one of the relatively nonexistent who find it hard to delude yourself and actually start to question your own hype.
you tell one friend and they tell two friends and so on and so on and so forth
so what? in new york you can be a poor duechebag who becomes a rich deuchbag and in europe you have to be a rich deuchebag first to be a rich deuchebag ...big whoop...what does it all mean?
even the most intelligent of us after all have an underlying awe and respect for success no matter how undeserved or random it may be.
how else for instance can one explain the phenomenom of someone like Madonna or that cat who's in al the you tube videos who now makes millions and millions of dollars and can't even meow correctly ...a cat! four legs...litter box...i mean jesus people what does a cat need with that kind of money...he can't even drive a car...
europeans definately definately have in the past had far more respect for the arts
but anyway the whole post is obsolete because there are no countries or continents anymore anyway and hardly any art...or at least much appreciation for it in any city ...just a general assholishness... only oppulence and poverty.
some guy though who ridiculously thinks he's still lives in france is probably masturbating right now to this post and eating crepes
so kudos in any event

[Sprezzatura]

It also helps if you can spell "douchebag" properly.

[gerald]

only if you're a woman